Dieting mind games and how we win at them

Many thanks to Laura (again!) for another great idea for The Big Issues. Many thanks also to Sue for reminding me that Why Do You Overeat (WDYO) has a couple of useful chapters on the psychology of eating. This is going to be a bumper issue with the motivational and psychological thoughts I have written all in one place.

Here is an extract of Chapter 21 & 23 from WDYO (A pdf download). The chapters are called; “Why do we eat and why do we overeat?” and “The most important chapter in WDYO (once you are free from addiction)”. You will notice the duplication between Chapter 12 in Stop Counting Calories and Chapter 23 from WDYO. The intro before the ‘devil and the angel voices’ in a dieter’s head is longer in WDYO and hopefully useful.

For completeness, here is the article on the Four Pillars of Childhood (another pdf download)– it really will be invaluable for you to honestly assess how your own childhood measured against these and then you have a more factual way of looking at what will be a deep rooted emotional web.

Introduction

I’ve had a good rummage around the club and picked out what seem to be three top themes in the area of mind games and dieting. If there are any others, please let me know and I can do a follow up article to capture them. This is a really important topic.

Just to recap – you will all be aware that I start from the premise that food addiction is more physical than psychological. That is not in any way to play down the psychological aspect – but, the main reason for writing WDYO was that I felt that the balance needed redressing and that we needed to realise that there are physical reasons for overeating. I found no other book that made the connection between the three conditions that I had come across and food cravings – just fleeting comments in medical books on the separate conditions – so it seemed an important topic to write about.